Monthly Archive:: April 2008

User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren't particularly zippy, given the screen redraw). Others don't mind UAC, but there's no doubt it's a controversial 'feature' of the OS. At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft's David Cross came out and said so: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross. Cross had more to say than just that: Microsoft is going to put more emphasis on whitelisting.

"The Fedora Project attracts a lot of interest from the Linux faithful. While there are perhaps more newbie-friendly, corporate-friendly, or special-interest-focused distributions, Fedora continues to wear the innovation hat. Fedora announced Fedora 9 Beta late last month, and Test Center reviewers replaced the current Fedora 8 install to see what the new version has to offer. Since Fedora 9 (Stirling) is still in beta, occasional bugs and some rough edges were inevitable. But there is a solid indication of the new things to come that makes the stable release, expected May 1, worth watching."

The SymphonyOS project released a new version. "The SymphonyOS Project is pleased to announce the release of SymphonyOne 2008.1, our first major release in almost a year. SymphonyOne is an almost 100% rewrite of all the Mezzo desktop code taking advantage of more features of fvwm to provide a smaller footprint and more stable environment. Based on Ubuntu 7.10, SymphonyOne provides a complete desktop environment and full Ubuntu compatibility on systems with as little as a 200mhz processor. SymphonyOne also introduces our new WebApps system which allows you to make any website into a program in your programs menu which runs as it’s own process in it’s own window."

"Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit. While the Linux desktop has yet to hit its stride, the operating system is showing up and lowering prices in everything from mobile phones, tablets, global positioning systems and even gas pumps."

"Symantec's comprehensive security report on the malware industry from July 1 to December 31, 2007, is now available in its 100+ page glory. Symantec broke down information on patch development time by operating system and by the type of vulnerability encountered. Surprisingly, Microsoft had the shortest time-to-patch over both halves of 2007. In the first part of the year, Microsoft released 38 patches (two of which involved third-party applications) with an average deployment time of 18 days. From July to December, Microsoft released 22 patches with an average patch time of six days. Red Hat came in second, at 32 days for the second half of the year and 36 days in the first half. That's quite a bit higher than Microsoft's average, but of the 227 vulnerabilities Red Hat patched in 2007, 226 of them involved third-party applications. Apple, Sun, and HP all lag well behind Microsoft and Red Hat, though the gap for each company differs significantly between the first and second halves of last year."

SEMI, the semiconductor manufacturing equipment trade group, interviewed Gordon Moore, the retired chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation, which he co-founded in 1968. Moore is widely known for 'Moore’s Law', a 1965 prediction that the number of components on a computer chip would double every year. The interview details the early days of semiconductor manufacturing.

Comic: "Copyright".

Ars Technica has an article about recent proposals to evolve the GTK+ toolkit: "The developers of GTK are preparing for a major overhaul that aims to resolve many of the framework's most significant deficiencies and add next-generation features that will increase flexibility and simplify development. This effort is still in the earliest planning stage, but several intriguing proposals provide valuable insight into some of the changes envisioned by prominent developers."

GNOME 2.22.1 has been released. "This is the first update to GNOME 2.22. Come and see all the bug fixing, all the new translations and all the updated documentation brought to you by the wonderful team of GNOME contributors! A lot of work has been done in the stable branch to make it even more solid than it was."

Microsoft plans to make a key Internet Explorer default change to thwart attackers trying to hack into its Web browser. The software maker will enable DEP/NX by default in IE 8 when the browser is running on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, a major tweak aimed at mitigating browser-based vulnerabilities. DEP/NX (Data Execution Prevention/No Execute) is already available in IE 7, but it's turned off by default because of compatibility issues.

Sun Microsystems is today officially debuting its two new 'massively threaded' servers based on the UltraSPARC T2+ processor. The major advancement in Sun's new CMT SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers is that both systems support two processors - whereas previous offerings topped out at a single socket. Each processor - part of the 'Niagara' line - is equipped with up to eight cores and 64 threads, which is par with the chip's predecessors. But with a fresh ability to double-up, a single machine is able to process 128 instructional threads at the same time. Sun heralds the chip consolidation as leading to better performance per watt and space efficiency.

"The rest of the server world can play with their piddling 2-3GHz chips. IBM, meanwhile, is prepared to deal in the 5GHz realm. The hardware maker has unveiled a Power6-based version of its highest-end Unix server - the Power 595. The box runs on 32 dual-core 5GHz Power6 processors, making it a true performance beast. This big box completes a protracted roll out of the Power6 chip across IBM's Unix server line."

Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring has been released. This new release brings features like full support for the Asus Eee, easy synchronization with Windows Mobile 5 and later, Blackberry, and Nokia devices, a new parental control utility, the Elisa multimedia centrer, Codeina for easy installation of necessary media codecs, and PulseAudio by default. Software updates include KDE 3.5.9 (with 4.0.2 available from the official repositories), GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, and Compiz 0.7. You can download the One (live/install CD) or Free (traditional installer, 100% free/open source software) editions of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring right here. BitTorrent download links can be found here. The main 2008 Spring page on the Mandriva Wiki has more information.

MikeOS 1.3.0 has been released, with a new Minicom-like serial terminal program, a PCX image viewer, and many updates to the system calls and documentation. MikeOS is designed to teach x86 assembly language and basic OS construction, as detailed in the Handbook.